Promotion of ontological comprehension: Exposing terms and metadata with web 2.0

Knowledge artifacts that have been labeled as ontologies have many different qualities and intended outcomes. This is particularly true of bio-ontologies where high demand has led to a rapid growth in the number of these artifacts. Good communication between the human agents involved in the life cycle of ontologies is essential for the ontologist to encode the right knowledge in the ontology. Not only this, but it should be encoded such that subsequent retrieval of the knowledge from the ontology by any agent can be clear and precise. The ontologist can encode ontological statements, for interpretation by a computer agent, or meta-ontological statements, for interpretation by human agents. We consider how the current communication between agents and ontologies produces drawbacks that add to the considerable overheads associated with ontology development. We describe the processes of communication between human agents and ontologies as Ontology Comprehension. We then suggest how these processes could be augmented, particularly with the use of Web 2.0 ideas. By exposing and enhancing the social interactions involved in ontology comprehension, development overheads are potentially reduced and the prospect of ontology sharing and reuse is improved.